This paper was presented at a colloquium entitled “Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change,” organized by Charles D.Keeling, held November 13–15, 1995, at the National Academy of Sciences, Irvine, CA.

Tribute to Roger Revelle and his contribution to studies of carbon dioxide and climate change

W ALTER H. M UNK

Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0225

I first came to Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in the summer of 1939, after completing my junior year at the California Institute of Technology. Roger Revelle was 30 years old, with the rank of instructor (long since abolished by the University of California), and a lieutenant junior grade in the Naval Reserve. Roger invited me to come along on an experiment to measure currents in the waters over the California borderland. The standard tool was an Ekman Current Meter; for every 100 revolutions of a propeller, a 2-mm ball is dropped into a compass box with 36 compartments, each corresponding to a 10° segment in current direction. The trouble was that the balls would not fall into the compartments. Roger was up all night doggedly fussing with the current meter until, at breakfast time, the release was functioning. This is my earliest memory of Roger.

Scripps and the War Years

After taking up geology at Pomona College under the legendary teacher Alfred “Woody” Woodford, followed by a graduate year at University of California at Berkeley, Roger came to Scripps in 1931 to study deep-sea muds. By 1936 he had completed his thesis, “Marine Bottom Samples Collected in the Pacific Ocean by the Carnegie on Its Seventh Cruise,” and stayed on as an instructor ( Fig. 1 ). During his year at Berkeley, Roger married Ellen Clark, a grandniece of E. W. Scripps and Ellen B. Scripps, after whom the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was named.

After a year at the Geophysical Institute in Bergen, Norway, he returned to Scripps. Roger went on active naval duty 6 months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and stayed in the Navy for 7 years. He was instrumental in organizing the Office of Naval Research. In 1946 he was officer in charge during Operation Crossroads of the geophysical measurements taken during the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. None of the participants will ever forget this experience. For many years, Roger contributed to the understanding of the environmental effects of radiation and to questions of disposal of atomic wastes at sea ( 1 ). [Revelle contributed to the report in ref. 1 as Chairman of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR).] I suspect that Roger’s participation for so many years, from 1958 to 1981, in the Pugwash Disarmament Conferences can be traced to the Bikini bomb tests.

The Scripps Directorship

After more than 40 years as a local marine station, Scripps Institution had agreed to undertake a program to study the disappearance of sardines from California waters ( Fig. 2 ). This involved the commissioning of two vessels. Scripps Director Harald Sverdrup was anxious for Roger to return to La Jolla to succeed him as director of Scripps. Sverdrup ( 2 ) wrote, “regardless of the capacity in which you return here, you are the logical man to take charge . . . of the work at sea.”

Sverdrup’s support for me as successor is also based upon the fact that I am practically the only person available who has had extensive experience at sea, in particular in the organization and carrying out of expeditions. He feels that Scripps must be, at least in part, re-oriented toward work on the high seas rather than the inshore and laboratory type of research which is being largely done at present.

Sverdrup’s statement “regardless of the capacity in which you return” was a reference to a developing opposition to Roger as the next director. One Scripps professor complained that Roger was too untidy to be trusted with administration ( 3 ), noting that he “just let everything pile up on his desk” and “was to easily diverted.” Again Roger agreed ( 3 ), referring to his own “obvious and numerous weaknesses, such as a tendency to procrastinate, to take on too many obligations, not to delegate authority, to be high-handed.”

The outcome was that Carl Eckart was appointed director of Scripps in 1948, and Roger was appointed associate director with the expectation to succeed Eckart in a few years. It wasn’t that easy! A 1950 letter to University of California President Robert Sproul ( 4 ), signed by more than half the Scripps faculty, states:

We understand that the impression has been gained in some quarters that opposition is vanishing at Scripps Institution to Dr. Revelle as a candidate for Director. We assure you that whereas we have a high regard and friendship for him, we feel as strongly as before that his appointment . . . would not be in the interest of the institution. His recent administrative actions confirmed our conviction.

Roger was appointed director in 1950. It is a tribute to Roger’s disdain for pettiness that some years later one of the writers referred to Roger’s “brilliant Directorship” ( 13 ).

The Heady Expedition Days

The era opened in 1950 with the Mid-Pacific expedition into the equatorial waters of the central Pacific Ocean. This was followed in 1952–1953 by an extended voyage to the South Pacific, which was called Capricorn. Both expeditions were led personally by Roger. It was discovered that only a thin veneer of sediments overlies the solid rock, that the heat flow through the sea floor is about the same as that on land, and that the flat-topped seamounts at a depth of 2,000 m had been volcanic islands less than 100 million years ago. All of this spoke for great mobility of the “solid” Earth. When Roger and his

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This paper was presented at a colloquium entitled “Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change,” organized by Charles D. Keeling, held November 13–15, 1995, at the National Academy of Sciences, Irvine, CA.
Tribute to Roger Revelle and his contribution to studies of carbon dioxide and climate change
W ALTER H. M UNK
Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0225
I first came to Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in the summer of 1939, after completing my junior year at the California Institute of Technology. Roger Revelle was 30 years old, with the rank of instructor (long since abolished by the University of California), and a lieutenant junior grade in the Naval Reserve. Roger invited me to come along on an experiment to measure currents in the waters over the California borderland. The standard tool was an Ekman Current Meter; for every 100 revolutions of a propeller, a 2-mm ball is dropped into a compass box with 36 compartments, each corresponding to a 10° segment in current direction. The trouble was that the balls would not fall into the compartments. Roger was up all night doggedly fussing with the current meter until, at breakfast time, the release was functioning. This is my earliest memory of Roger.
Scripps and the War Years
After taking up geology at Pomona College under the legendary teacher Alfred “Woody” Woodford, followed by a graduate year at University of California at Berkeley, Roger came to Scripps in 1931 to study deep-sea muds. By 1936 he had completed his thesis, “Marine Bottom Samples Collected in the Pacific Ocean by the Carnegie on Its Seventh Cruise,” and stayed on as an instructor ( Fig. 1 ). During his year at Berkeley, Roger married Ellen Clark, a grandniece of E. W. Scripps and Ellen B. Scripps, after whom the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was named.
After a year at the Geophysical Institute in Bergen, Norway, he returned to Scripps. Roger went on active naval duty 6 months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and stayed in the Navy for 7 years. He was instrumental in organizing the Office of Naval Research. In 1946 he was officer in charge during Operation Crossroads of the geophysical measurements taken during the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. None of the participants will ever forget this experience. For many years, Roger contributed to the understanding of the environmental effects of radiation and to questions of disposal of atomic wastes at sea ( 1 ). [Revelle contributed to the report in ref. 1 as Chairman of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR).] I suspect that Roger’s participation for so many years, from 1958 to 1981, in the Pugwash Disarmament Conferences can be traced to the Bikini bomb tests.
The Scripps Directorship
After more than 40 years as a local marine station, Scripps Institution had agreed to undertake a program to study the disappearance of sardines from California waters ( Fig. 2 ). This involved the commissioning of two vessels. Scripps Director Harald Sverdrup was anxious for Roger to return to La Jolla to succeed him as director of Scripps. Sverdrup ( 2 ) wrote, “regardless of the capacity in which you return here, you are the logical man to take charge . . . of the work at sea.”
And Roger ( 3 ) agreed:
Sverdrup’s support for me as successor is also based upon the fact that I am practically the only person available who has had extensive experience at sea, in particular in the organization and carrying out of expeditions. He feels that Scripps must be, at least in part, re-oriented toward work on the high seas rather than the inshore and laboratory type of research which is being largely done at present.
Sverdrup’s statement “regardless of the capacity in which you return” was a reference to a developing opposition to Roger as the next director. One Scripps professor complained that Roger was too untidy to be trusted with administration ( 3 ), noting that he “just let everything pile up on his desk” and “was to easily diverted.” Again Roger agreed ( 3 ), referring to his own “obvious and numerous weaknesses, such as a tendency to procrastinate, to take on too many obligations, not to delegate authority, to be high-handed.”
The outcome was that Carl Eckart was appointed director of Scripps in 1948, and Roger was appointed associate director with the expectation to succeed Eckart in a few years. It wasn’t that easy! A 1950 letter to University of California President Robert Sproul ( 4 ), signed by more than half the Scripps faculty, states:
We understand that the impression has been gained in some quarters that opposition is vanishing at Scripps Institution to Dr. Revelle as a candidate for Director. We assure you that whereas we have a high regard and friendship for him, we feel as strongly as before that his appointment . . . would not be in the interest of the institution. His recent administrative actions confirmed our conviction.
Roger was appointed director in 1950. It is a tribute to Roger’s disdain for pettiness that some years later one of the writers referred to Roger’s “brilliant Directorship” ( 13 ).
The Heady Expedition Days
The era opened in 1950 with the Mid-Pacific expedition into the equatorial waters of the central Pacific Ocean. This was followed in 1952–1953 by an extended voyage to the South Pacific, which was called Capricorn. Both expeditions were led personally by Roger. It was discovered that only a thin veneer of sediments overlies the solid rock, that the heat flow through the sea floor is about the same as that on land, and that the flat-topped seamounts at a depth of 2,000 m had been volcanic islands less than 100 million years ago. All of this spoke for great mobility of the “solid” Earth. When Roger and his

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colleagues tried to core and dredge the Tonga Trench, the instruments came up battered and bent, and empty. If there were any sediments, they were sparse and thin. The observations could best be explained if the rocky sea floor was disappearing into the Earth along the axis of the trench (this is now called subduction). On Capricorn, Ronald Mason towed a magnetometer behind the vessel and recorded a complicated set of wiggles that no one could understand. Later Mason produced a map of the magnetic field under the sea floor showing stripes of normal and reverse magnetization.
FIG. 1. Roger Revelle as an instructor at Scripps (circa 1936). Photo by Eugene LaFond. [Reproduced with the permission of the SIO Archives, UCSD.]
With hindsight, the evidence was all there for proclaiming the doctrine of plate tectonics. And when, 10 years later, the puzzle was put together, Scripps unfortunately did not play a leading role. Still, I think of the 1950s as the great era of the Institution. When Roger left in 1961, Scripps had a Navy bigger than that of Costa Rica.
Greenhouse
Even as he led the exploration of the Pacific, Roger was active for several years in promoting the International Geophysical Year (IGY). In 1956 he became chairman of the IGY Panel on Oceanography. That same year, Charles David Keeling joined the Scripps Institution staff to head the IGY program on Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and to start the measurements at Mauna Loa and Antarctica. And that is why we are here 40 years later. Keeling credits Harry Wexler and Roger Revelle for insisting on the continuity of the measurements; such time series are few and far between and worth their weight in gold.
In 1957, Roger and Hans Suess demonstrated that carbon dioxide had increased in the air as a result of the consumption of fossil fuels, in a famous article published in Tellus (5). Roger’s interest in CO2 was to engage his attention for the rest of his life. In 1965, the President’s Science Advisory Committee Panel on Environmental Pollution under Roger’s leadership published the first authoritative report that recognized CO2 from fossil fuels as a potential global problem (6). Public opinion was influenced through a widely read article in Scientific American (7).
Roger participated in the exploration of the atmospheric greenhouse problem from the 1950s, when it was a cottage industry for a few academics, to the 1990s, when global climate change involved industry and government on an international scale. He once estimated that he had spent 20% of his time keeping current with the issues.
THE MOHOLE PROJECT
In 1957 Roger and I were among a group that called themselves the American Miscellaneous Society (AMSOC). AMSOC promoted an attempt to drill through the ocean floor into the Earth’s mantle. A test off Guadalupe Island successfully drilled through 200 m of sediments into the basalt in water 4,000 m deep, demonstrating the feasibility of “dynamic positioning.” This MOHOLE project (Fig. 3) eventually failed because of poor Washington management but led some years later to the successful Ocean Drilling Program.
Ocean Leadership
The U.S. ocean program was then firmly in the hands of three men: Maurice Ewing, Columbus Iselin, and Roger Revelle. There has not been a comparable ocean leadership since those days. *
While Revelle served as a founding member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Oceanography (NASCO), the funds budgeted nationally for oceanography rose from $12 million in 1957 to $97 million in 1960. Roger played a major role in organizing the IGY and in forming the Scientific Committee for Ocean Research (SCOR) and the International Oceanographic Commission (IOC), and then served as Chairman of a joint IOC/SCOR Committee on Climate Changes and the Ocean. These organizations continue to play an important role in international oceanography.
Roger enjoyed an international reputation as oceanographer in the 1950s but became better known to the greater scientific community and to the public through his work for the National Academy of Sciences as a science spokesman with broad knowledge of the environment. He worked very hard behind the scenes to frame the important scientific questions and then to secure the resources to answer them. Policy makers looked to him for a reasonable assessment of which scientific problems should take priority. Scientists sought his advice and support to focus research and get it funded. Congressman Emilio Daddario (8) has remarked on Roger’s “combined experience, intelligence and good judgment about issues.”
Building the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), 1954–1961
In parallel with these developments came the beginnings of the UCSD. No oceanographic program, Roger said, could maintain intellectual excellence for more than a generation without an attachment to a great university. The obvious site was some 1,100 acres of largely undeveloped public land just to the north of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Fortuitously, Roger’s initiative coincided with a new master plan for the
*
This may have changed; in the last several years, Admiral (U.S. Navy, ret.) James Watkins has become a recognized national spokesman for ocean affairs.

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shortages, Director William Nierenberg surprised Judith and me in a SIO laboratory as we were using laser pulses to remove encrustation’s from a renaissance statue. “What are you doing?” Bill asked. “I am doing oceanography,” I replied.
FIG. 5. Roger in 1976. Photo by Glasheen. [Negative AN24/ 41906/484/34, UCSD Special Collections.]
A Personal Appreciation
Roger and I have collaborated on a number of papers: on a global compilation of the seasonal change in sea level, on an attempt to infer the melting of the Greenland ice cap from the slowing of the Earth’s rate of rotation and the motion of the pole toward Greenland, and on a 1977 National Academy of Sciences report (11) in which we traced the partition CO2 among the atmosphere, ocean, and biosphere. Roger’s way of working was anything but analytical; rather he followed a Sherlock Holmes procedure of eliminating one hypothesis after another. In doing his sums, he showed an accountant’s revulsion for dropping nonsignificant digits.
But my thoughts of Roger are not particularly related to these joint publications. He was my friend for 50 years. I remember weekends in the Revelle cottage in Julian, and sailing in the Aegean. I remember all-night sessions of Roger and Harry Hess at the Cosmos Club. I remember 9 months in the South Pacific, with a luncheon hosted by the Crown Prince, now King, of Tonga. I remember sleepless nights with Roger and John Steinbeck on the drilling ship CUSS I in Mexican waters prior to the demise of the MOHOLE Project.
Toward the end of his life, Roger’s health deteriorated; he walked in pain and with some difficulty. One year before his death, I was visiting John Knauss, then Administrator of The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), to seek help for the Heard Island Expedition, when Roger unexpectedly showed up. He had walked the endless corridors of the commerce building to lend his silent support. During the expedition, when all the equipment was demolished in a gale on station in the South Indian Ocean, Roger sent a soothing message by fax: “Wish I were with you; and then I am glad I’m not.” Roger was upset by a critical news article on the Heard Island Expedition published in Science (14) and wrote a letter to the editor starting with the words: “Shame on you” (15). It was to be the last thing Roger published (Fig. 5).
In an obituary for the Independent of London (12), the oceanographer Henry Charnock spoke for many of us when he noted that, “[f]or an informed view on earth science, and on its repercussions on the human predicament, he was in a class of his own.”
Deborah Day at Scripps Archives is responsible for much of this material.
1. Revelle, R. ( 1956 ) The Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation: A Report to the Public ( National Academy of Sciences , Washington, DC ).
2. Sverdrup, H. , Director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography . Letter to Comdr. Roger Revelle, Cosmos Club, Washington, DC, September 25, 1947 . Roger Revelle Papers (MC 6), Box 2, Folder 10. SIO Archives, UCSD .
3. Revelle, R. Letter to Dean M. P. O’Brien, University of California, Berkeley, November 7, 1947 . Roger Revelle Papers (MC 6), Box 2, Folder 10. SIO Archives, UCSD .
4. Fox, D. , Hubbs, C. , McEwen, G. , Shepard, F. & ZoBell, C. Letter to Robert Sproul, President of the University of California, Office of the President, Berkeley, April 12, 1950 . S. V. “Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Part I: Directorship 1947–50.” Bancroft Library , University Archives , University of California , Berkeley .
5. Revelle, R. & Suess, H. E. ( 1957 ) Tellus 9 , 18–27 .
6. Revelle, R. , Broecker, W. , Craig, H. , Keeling, C. D. & Smagorinsky, J. ( 1965 ) Restoring the Quality of our Environment: Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel, President’s Science Advisory Committee ( The White House , Washington, DC ), pp. 111–133 .
7. Revelle, R. ( 1982 ) Sci. Am. 247 , 35–43 .
8. Daddario, E. Q. “The Revelle Impact,” Transcription of a speech delivered at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography , March 10, 1984 , p. 3 . Accession 84–14. SIO Archives, UCSD .
9. Revelle, R. “On Starting a University,” Manuscript prepared but not published by Daedalus , 1974 , p. 3 . Roger Revelle Papers (MC6A), Box 158, Folder 19. SIO Archives, UCSD .
10. Lister, P. , “Revelle Awarded National Medal of Science ‘90,” San Diego Daily Transcript , June 27, 1990 , p. 1A .
11. Revelle, R. & Munk, W. H. ( 1977 ) Energy and Climate ( National Academy of Sciences , Washington, DC ), pp. 140–158 .
12. Charnock, H. , “Professor Roger Revelle,” The Independent (London) , August 5, 1991 .
13. Day, D. “Memorandum of Conversation with Dr. Francis P. Shepard , July 27, 1981 . SIO Archives, UCSD .
14. Cohen, J. ( 1991 ) Science 252 , 912 .
15. Revelle, R. ( 1991 ) Science 253 , 118 .